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2. Making money in the new economy. According to “The Economist”, the share of corporate income that goes to workers, as opposed to shareholders, has been going down for 30 years, and not just in America, but also across the world. In a separate report, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development estimates that the share of worker income has decreased from 66 percent to 62 percent since the early 1990s. That’s why, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute, after-inflation wages have gone up only about 10 percent (and the minimum wage hasn’t gone up at all), but the stock market has enriched investors including Wall Street bankers, as well as retirees, pension funds and school endowments by about 400 percent.
US News and World Report July 18, 2014 -
Despite escalating costs and recent debates as to whether obtaining a four-year degree is worth it, having a college education is still the best route to financial success.
The Economic Policy Institute found that those with a four-year college degree made 98 percent more per hour on average in 2013 than those without a degree.
As college tuition and education-related expenses continue to escalate, it’s more important than ever to calculate how much you need to save and start saving early. And enrolling in a college savings program can help you meet your financial goals.
WTOP July 18, 2014 -
As the Economy Policy Institute (EPI) notes,
Tipped workers — whose wages typically fall in the bottom quartile of all U.S. wage earners, even after accounting for tips — are a growing portion of the U.S. workforce. Employment in the full-service restaurant industry has grown over 85 percent since 1990, while overall private-sector employment grew by only 24 percent. In fact, today more than one in 10 U.S. workers is employed in the leisure and hospitality sector, making labor policies for these industries all the more central to defining typical American work life.
EPI also cites research that the poverty rate of tipped workers is nearly double that of other workers (as the chart below indicates), and that tipped employees are 3 times more likely to be on food stamps.
VOX July 18, 2014 -
— The vast majority of white students, including poor students, are in classrooms with other students who aren’t poor. But most minority students are in classrooms with other students living in poverty. The Economic Policy Institute: http://bit.ly/TmoGmC.
Politico July 10, 2014 -
The issue in part is that STEM is in many ways too broad a classification to describe the complicated job market right now. A May 2014 report from the Government Accountability Office found that employment and wage outcomes could vary widely between healthcare STEM jobs, so-called “core STEM” jobs, and other STEM jobs.
“STEM makes no sense as a category. What you have is science and engineering, and then you have this IT labor force,” says Hal Salzman, a professor of planning and public policy at Rutgers University. “It’s a non-differentiated category that makes no analytic sense.”
Lumping all STEM occupations together can therefore muddy the waters of studying the supposed STEM shortage. On the other hand, STEM is a good descriptor of where America’s job applicants are falling short, says another expert.
VOX July 10, 2014 -
So far, the federal government has largely stayed out of the way. Congress has not taken up President Barack Obama’s call to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour from $7.25. And with the exception of a few companies, like Costco, In-N-Out Burger and Boloco, businesses haven’t taken the initiative to create higher paying jobs.
Puzder made $4.4 million in 2012, according to Forbes. That’s about 291 times what a minimum wage worker makes in a year, if they’re earning the federal minimum and working full-time. The average fast food CEO made 721 times what minimum wage workers took in in 2013, according to a recent report from the Economic Policy Institute.
Huffington Post July 10, 2014 -
“It’s really a political talking point that’s managed its way into legislation,” said Tom Quaadman, vice president of the capital markets center for the Chamber of Commerce, during a 2012 effort by business groups and congressional Republicans to repeal it.
A report released last month by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning Washington think tank, found that top executives at the nation’s 350 top publicly traded firms are getting paid nearly 300 times that of the average worker, earning an average of $15.2 million each in 2013.
“The fact that CEOs make almost 300 times what workers make should set off alarms,” said institute President Lawrence Mishel about the report.
“CEOs are making more and more while workers are making less — even when worker productivity is skyrocketing,” he said.
The Hill July 10, 2014 -
The ruling evokes the problems that hindered organizing back in the 1990s, when SEIU first started reaching out to home health aides in California. The high turnover and poverty wages made it a challenge to persuade workers to invest in any organizing project. But the union combined grassroots outreach with community education to enlist both local officials and consumers behind the union, and Illinois followed in 2003, turning homecare workers into official state employees and weaving together a strong union shop from thousands of individual providers in separate homes.
Unionization paid off once the workers were hooked into the collective bargaining system. According to the Economic Policy Institute, wages jumped by 65 percent over a decade, workers gained health insurance coverage and job training, and recently negotiated to establish a formal grievance procedure. Home healthcare programs in California and Washington have seen similar gains in wages and benefits, which would otherwise be extremely rare in the in-home workforce.
The Nation July 10, 2014 -
Lots of talk has percolated recently about whether a sudden burst of rapid wage growth would force the Fed’s hand in pulling back monetary stimulus to the U.S. economy. Some who, like me, do not see any evidence of an imminent wage take-off have argued that the Fed should wait for some evidence of wage inflation before hitting the brakes.
These arguments essentially treat a pickup of wage growth as a problem to be guarded against. But the most conspicuous failure in the U.S. economy over the past generation, by far, has been too slow wage growth for the vast majority of American workers. A recent report that I co-authored with colleagues from the Economic Policy Institute showed that a range of pressing economic problems–rising income inequality, failure to rapidly reduce poverty, failure to rapidly increase mobility, and even the too-sluggish recovery from the Great Recession–are rooted in the failure of most American workers’ hourly wages to come anywhere close to matching the growth rate of productivity.
Wall Street Journal July 10, 2014 -
Who needs a raise? Nearly everyone, it turns out. Hourly wages in the U.S. are growing a modest 2 percent this year, keeping Americans barely ahead of inflation (or miles behind it if you happen to be strolling down the meat aisle at your local grocery store).
This is older news than you might think. Wages have been stagnant not only since the epic recession that followed the 2008 housing crash, but for decades. In 1979, median production and non-supervisory workers (who account for 80 percent of all private-sector employees) made an inflation-adjusted $15.75 an hour. As of 2013, that pay had inched up only to $16.70 — that’s a total gain of 6.1 percent over 34 years, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
CBS Moneywatch July 10, 2014